Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, (born Jan. 27, 1775, Leonberg, near Stuttgart, Württemberg [Germany]—died Aug. 20, 1854, Bad Ragaz, Switz.) German philosopher and educator, a major figure of German idealism, in the post-Kantian development in German philosophy. He was ennobled (with the addition of von) in 1806.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.

Early life and career.

Schelling’s father was a Lutheran minister, who in 1777 became a professor of Oriental languages at the theological seminary in Bebenhausen, near Tübingen. It was there that Schelling received his elementary education. He was a highly gifted child, and he had already learned the classical languages at the age of eight. On the basis of his rapid intellectual development, he was admitted, at the age of 15, to the theological seminary in Tübingen, a famous finishing school for ministers of the Württemberg area, where he lived from 1790 to 1795. The youths at Tübingen were inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution and, spurning tradition, turned away from doctrinal theology to philosophy. The young Schelling was inspired, however, by the thought of Immanuel Kant, who had raised philosophy to a higher critical level, and by the idealist system of Johann Fichte, as well as by the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, a 17th-century rationalist. When he was 19 years old Schelling wrote his first philosophical work, Über die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie überhaupt (1795; “On the Possibility and Form of Philosophy in General”), which he sent to Fichte, who expressed strong approval. It was followed by Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (“Of the Ego as Principle of Philosophy”). One basic theme governs both of these works—the Absolute. This Absolute cannot be defined, however, as God; each person is himself the Absolute as the Absolute ego. This ego, eternal and timeless, is apprehended in a direct intuition, which, in contrast to sensory intuition, can be characterized as intellectual.

From 1795 to 1797 Schelling acted as a private tutor for a noble family, who had placed its sons under his care during their studies in Leipzig. The time spent in Leipzig marked a decisive turning point in the thought of Schelling. He attended lectures in physics, chemistry, and medicine. He acknowledged that Fichte, whom he had previously revered as his philosophical model, had not taken adequate notice of nature in his philosophical system, inasmuch as Fichte had always viewed nature only as an object in its subordination to man. Schelling, in contrast, wanted to show that nature, seen in itself, shows an active development toward the spirit. This philosophy of nature, the first independent philosophical accomplishment of Schelling, made him known in the circles of the Romanticists.

In 1798 Schelling was called to a professorship at the University of Jena, the academic centre of Germany at the time, where many of the foremost intellects of the time were gathered. During this period Schelling was extremely productive, publishing a rapid succession of works on the philosophy of nature. It was Schelling’s desire, as attested by his famous work System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800; “System of Transcendental Idealism”), to unite his concept of nature with Fichte’s philosophy, which took the ego as the point of departure. Schelling saw that art mediates between the natural and physical spheres insofar as, in artistic creation, the natural (or unconscious) and the spiritual (or conscious) productions are united. Naturalness and spirituality are explained as emerging from an original state of indifference, in which they were submerged in the yet-undeveloped Absolute, and as rising through a succession of steps of ever-higher order. Fichte did not acknowledge this concept, however, and the two writers attacked each other most sharply in an intensive correspondence.

The time spent in Jena was important for Schelling also in a personal respect: there he became acquainted with Caroline Schlegel, among the most gifted women in German Romanticism, and married her in 1803. The unpleasant intrigues that accompanied this marriage and the dispute with Fichte caused Schelling to leave Jena, and he accepted an appointment at the University of Würzburg.

At first, Schelling lectured there on the philosophy of identity, conceived in his last years in Jena, in which he tried to show that, in all beings, the Absolute expresses itself directly as the unity of the subjective and the objective. It was just on this point that G.W.F. Hegel initiated his criticism of Schelling. Hegel had at first taken Schelling’s side in the disagreement between Schelling and Fichte, and complete unanimity seemed to exist between them in 1802 when they coedited the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (“Critical Journal of Philosophy”). In the following years, however, Hegel’s philosophical thought began to move significantly away from Schelling’s, and his Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Mind) contained strong charges against Schelling’s system. To Schelling’s definition of the Absolute as an indiscriminate unity of the subjective and the objective, Hegel replied that such an Absolute is comparable to the night, “in which all cows are black.” Besides, Schelling had never explicitly shown how one could ascend to the Absolute; he had begun with this Absolute as though it were “shot out of a pistol.”

This criticism struck Schelling a heavy blow. The friendship with Hegel that had existed since their time together at the seminary in Tübingen broke up. Schelling, who had been regarded as the leading philosopher of the time until the publication of Hegel’s Phänomenologie, was pushed into the background.

This situation caused Schelling to retreat from public life. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich, where, in 1806, he was appointed as general secretary of the Academy of Plastic Arts. He lectured from 1820 to 1827 in Erlangen. Caroline’s death on Sept. 7, 1809, led him to write a philosophical work on immortality. In 1812 Schelling married Pauline Gotter, a friend of Caroline. The marriage was harmonious, but the great passion that Schelling had felt for Caroline was unrepeatable.

During the years in Munich, Schelling tried to consolidate his philosophical work in a new way, producing a revision that was instigated by Hegel’s criticism. Schelling questioned all idealistic speculations built on the assumption that the world presents itself as a rational cosmos. Were there not also irrational things, he asked, and was not evil the predominant power in the world? In his Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesener menschlichen Freiheit (1809; Of Human Freedom), Schelling declared that the freedom of man is a real freedom only if it is freedom for good and evil. The possibility of this freedom is founded on two principles that are active in every living thing: one, a dark primal foundation that manifests itself in carnal desire and impulse; the other, a clearheaded sensibleness that governs as a formative power. Man, however, has placed the dark stratum of impulse, which was meant only to serve the intellect as a source of power, above the intellect and has thus subordinated the intellect to the impulses, which now rule over him. This reversal of the right order is the occurrence known in the Bible as the Fall from grace, through which evil came into the world. But this perversion of man is revoked by God, who becomes man in Christ and thus reestablishes the original order.

Period of the later, unpublished philosophy.

The position developed in the work on freedom forms the basis of Schelling’s later philosophy, covering the time from 1810 until his death, which is known only through a draft of the unpublished work Die Weltalter (written in 1811; The Ages of the World) and through the manuscripts of his later lectures. In Die Weltalter Schelling wanted to relate the history of God. God, who originally is absorbed in a quiet longing, comes to himself by glimpsing in himself ideas through which he becomes conscious of himself. This self-consciousness, which is identical to freedom, enables God to project these ideas from himself—i.e., to create the world.

Schelling’s appointment to the University of Berlin in 1841 gave him an opportunity once again to develop public interest in his conceptions. The Prussian king of that time, Frederick William IV, hoped that Schelling would combat the so-called dragon’s seed of Hegelianism in Berlin, where Hegel had been working until his death in 1831. Schelling’s first lecture in Berlin manifested his self-consciousness. Schelling declared that in his youth he had opened a new page in the history of philosophy and that now in his maturity he wanted to turn this page and start yet a newer one. Such notables as Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Jakob Burckhardt, and Mikhail Bakunin were in his audience. Schelling, however, had no great success in Berlin. Moreover, he was embittered when his lectures were plagiarized by an opponent who wanted to submit the positive philosophy of Schelling, now finally disclosed in these lectures, to the public for examination. Schelling initiated a legal suit but lost the case. He resigned and discontinued lecturing.

The content of these final lectures, however, represented the climax of Schelling’s creative activity. Schelling divided philosophy into a negative philosophy, which developed the idea of God by means of reason alone, and, in contrast, a positive philosophy, which showed the reality of this idea by reasoning a posteriori from the fact of the world to God as its creator. Schelling then explained (referring to his work on freedom) that man, who wanted to be equal to God, stood up against God in his Fall into sin. God, however, was soon elevated again as the principle. During the era of mythology, God appeared as a dark power. During the era of revelation, however, God emerged in history as manifestly real in the figure of Christ. Thus, the complete history of religion should be conveyed through philosophical thought.

Personality and significance.

Schelling is described as a man of thickset build, and, according to favourable reports, his high forehead and sparkling eyes were impressive. Opponents of his philosophy, however, such as Karl Rosenkranz, a disciple of Hegel, spoke of a sharp and piercing look. His character was unbalanced. Schelling has been described as nervous, unpredictable, and deeply sensitive in his proud fashion. Particularly striking was his unwavering consciousness that it was his mission to bring philosophy to a definite completion.

Great philosophical influence was denied to Schelling. The philosophical situation at the time was determined not by the few disciples of Schelling but by the Hegelians. The right-wing Hegelians occupied all of the philosophical professorial chairs and handed down the tradition of Hegel’s system. The left-wing Hegelians explained that, even to suspend Hegel’s system, an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy was necessary. Thus, in tracing the development of German Idealism, the early and middle Schelling—that is, the Schelling who drew up the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of identity—has been placed between the Idealism of Fichte, who started from the ego, and Hegel’s system of the Absolute spirit.

The independence of Schelling and his importance for philosophy are only now being recognized, and that in connection with Existential philosophy and philosophical anthropology, which conceive themselves as counteracting the philosophy of absolute reason. The later Schelling now turns out to have been the first thinker to illuminate Hegel’s philosophy critically. In particular, Schelling’s insight that man is determined not only by reason but also by dark natural impulses is now valued as a positive attempt to understand the reality of man on a level more profound than that attained by Hegel.

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(1775-1854).Along with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schelling was one of the chief successors of Immanuel Kant in German philosophy. He tried to solve the age-old problem of the relationship of the knowing mind to the rest of reality. Schelling developed a philosophy of nature and emphasized the self-existence of the objective world. Nature, he believed, is an organism endowed with a soul. Like Plato, Schelling taught that all ideas originate in the eternal spirit of God, who cannot be known by speculation, only by experience. Schelling believed that artistic creativity, not morality, is the highest human achievement.